Stranger Things

In short, unless you’re for some reason dying for a reinvention of the wheel, you’re gonna love this. It’s suspenseful, exciting, funny and scary as hell.

It’s hard not to get swept up in the warm, cozy blanket of these familiar settings and endearing characters, and the sweeping blockbuster nature of the thing.

While casual viewers might be put off by the deep dives into the series' lore and episode run times that aren't exactly binge-friendly, the fans who have loved Stranger Things all along should find themselves riveted by Season 4's most electrifying turn of events.

To its credit, the lingering pace doesn’t translate to any boring moments. Stranger Things still injects an enthralling backstory into its well-established universe. It’s an indication that the final two episodes of Volume 2 (dropping on July 1), despite its movie length, will only elevate season four.

This season, Stranger Things is working harder and smarter.

The good news is that “Chapter Six: The Dive” and “Chapter Seven: The Massacre at Hawkins Lab,” reward the audience with a lot of answers, revelations, and pay-offs.

The visual effects are more sophisticated and so is the filmmaking; the transitions between scenes, which track four different running story lines, are more elegant and make a sprawling season feel relatively cohesive. Does it feel bloated given those longer run-times? At times, yes. But by episode three, I was again invested in what’s happening in Hawkins (as well as some new locations), and less concerned about the amount of minutes that investment required.

There is plenty of fun to be had in “Stranger Things 4,” which both celebrates and parodies a decade that pushed conformity, conservatism and questionable style.

Stranger Things is bigger, older, somewhat sadder – and as lovable as ever.

“Stranger Things” is still damn good summertime entertainment.

Too much? Not a bit of it. Stranger Things is a 1980s Americana theme park, and it is all the better when it embraces that fact.

If you liked Stranger Things before, you’ll like it again this time around. Formulaic TV works when the formula is this good.

It may have more characters than it knows what to do with, but Stranger Things’ most sinister season yet still knows how to send shivers up your spine.

Amid the show’s ballooning scale and scope, Stranger Things finds an unexpected anchor not in its ensemble of fan favorites but in its latest villain: a supernatural serial killer dubbed Vecna after—what else?—a Dungeons and Dragons character. Vecna resides in the Upside Down, but unlike previous visitors, he’s humanlike, with a voice, a face, and, most chilling of all, a worldview.

Stranger Things has always been walking a line between tribute and pastiche, and it sometimes ends up on the wrong side. The strange thing is that this cast remains so charming, I don’t really mind watching them going through the motions.

It's still Stranger Things, so die-hard fans will adore it, it's just a lot more not-as-good Stranger Things.

Make the journey worth it, and fans will forgive the bumpy ride to get there. For now, despite the return of “Blockbuster Television,” most of those questions about this show’s place in the entertainment world in the 2020s remain unanswered.